Being Prepared

Sebastian Junger started Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues—RISC—after his friend the photographer Tim Hetherington died in Libya from a shrapnel wound, in April of 2011. “He bled out in the back of a pickup truck minutes from the hospital,” Junger said recently on the phone, adding that the wound wasn’t necessarily a mortal one and that if someone had known how to stanch the bleeding “he might have made it there alive.” Junger called his course RISC because, “if it was called something cautious like Safety Training, probably no one would take it,” he said. “People who go to combat zones do it in spite of the risk, or perhaps because of it.”

RISC held its second session in battlefield medicine recently—the first took place last April, around the anniversary of Hetherington’s death. Both sessions, run by Wilderness Medical Associates, lasted three days and were held at the Bronx Documentary Center, a gallery at 614 Courtlandt Avenue. Each session included twenty-four freelance journalists, mostly young men but also several young women, who had worked, variously, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, and Egypt. More than a few had been wounded. Michael Kamber, a combat photographer who runs the Documentary Center, said that RISC is only for freelancers, since staff reporters and photographers receive such training, and that a writer or a photographer “can get in the program only if you’ve worked in combat zones.” RISC doesn’t want to train people who won’t use what they’ve learned.

On the first two days, the journalists were taught to pack wounds by practicing on chicken carcasses, to deflate the pressure of a sucking chest wound, and to identify threats from insects and indigenous diseases. On the third day, one of the instructors, a woman named Sawyer Alberi, ran what she called the “capstone drill” for trauma in the center’s back yard, which is paved and borders the street. Alberi was a flight medic in Iraq, in 2006, and in Afghanistan, in 2010. She walked around the yard laying four dummies on the concrete. “We’re going to have some explosions, some smoke bombs,” she said. “There’s going to be some decent pandemonium.”

Eight journalists took part at a time. Alberi gave them body armor and camouflage pants and jackets to wear over their clothes. She knelt and poured blood powder into a paint can and mixed it with dishwashing liquid. “Hair gel is best,” she said, “but it’s a little hard to get a container of hair gel on an airplane.” She doused the dummies with fake blood, then gave everyone two tourniquets and some gauze while a young woman named Lily Hindy, who works for RISC, handed out rolls of tape. Kamber stood in the yard, and two female cops watched from the sidewalk. “Last time we did the drill, someone called in gunshots, so we’re encouraging the cops to stick around,” Kamber said.

“Two teams of four, please,” Alberi said. “Move when I tell you to move, so I don’t have to wrangle you.” She had each group crouch in a corner of the yard. “When I say, ‘Boom,’ those people”—meaning the dummies—“are hurt, and when I say, ‘Go,’ you can help them.”

A CD player began to broadcast gunshots and explosions and people screaming, while Alberi scampered around laying smoke bombs on the concrete. One of the cops put her cell phone through the fence and began filming.

“Come out and put some tourniquets on and drag them to a safe area,” Alberi shouted. The journalists, kneeling, began wrapping tourniquets around the dummies’ legs and cutting their clothes off to expose their chest wounds. Alberi ran among them, shouting, “Stop the bleeding, get them ready to go,” and “He’s bleeding to death, stop the bleeding.” When the journalists finished with the wounds, they picked the dummies up by the shoulders and feet and carried them to a litter, then wrapped them in heat blankets and taped the blankets closed.

“Helicopter’s here,” Alberi shouted. She had blood on her hands and her pants.

When all the dummies were on litters, Alberi turned off the tape player. “All right, good job. Pretty stressful, huh?”

“How long did that take us?” one of the journalists asked.

“Too long,” Alberi said.

When all three groups had performed the drill, the dummies were hosed down and Alberi put them in her jeep. Meanwhile, a number of the journalists went to lunch at a Mexican restaurant. Marie-Hélène Carleton, a documentary filmmaker, talked about Hetherington. “I met him in New York through the documentary-film community,” she said. “He was so generous with his time and sharing his contacts. He was to come look at our film in May, but he died. That was when I became acutely aware that things could go wrong very quickly.” ♦